Guide/Base Cooling

Base cooling is a pressing issue at all times. Difficult to manage, temperature might be the biggest challenge you will be facing in Oxygen not Included.

The main reasons for high temperatures are geyser water and machine heat, as you will need both through your game to keep your dupes alive.

Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier & Tempshift Plate
This solution can potentially solve any main overheat issue. Cooling water is one of the most difficult tasks in the game. Thermo Aquatuners are highly efficient, but ideally need Steel and Plastic for a steam turbine. These materials are not easily available until the mid-game. To cool your water or your base you can use the Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier and Tempshift Plates instead. Up to a point this also works well with the oxygen produced by Electrolyzers, with some of their produced hydrogen powering the AETN.

Hydrogen Cooling
Hydrogen is the most easily cooled gas and thus best suited for cooling your base. You will need electrolyzers or a hydrogen vent to produce the hydrogen, gathering it from pockets in the caustic biome would be too much trouble. Cool it with 1-3 Thermo Regulators depending of the amount of cooling you need. Snake the hydrogen line through your base, radiant pipes are the best, but regular pipes may also do.

Water Cooling With Hydrogen


You can cool water with cold hydrogen in just the same way as cooling the rest of your base, just snake the pipeline through your water deposit. If you want to cool both water and base with the same pipeline, you will want to put the water at the end of the line as to not have to water heat the hydrogen and then have the hydrogen heat the rest of your base.

Direct Base Cooling With Oxygen
Cooling oxygen is not the best solution for cooling your base, but if implemented correctly will be an easy and still very efficient way to air-condition your base.

Make an oxygen production facility, cool any produced oxygen either by Thermo Regulators or by snaking the pipe through a cold biome. The Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier can also be used to cool down about two pipes of oxygen with little effort, but will struggle with more. Gather it inside an insulated room with a High Pressure Gas Vent and when the time comes and your base needs to be cooled down, let your dupes use up as much of the oxygen in the base as possible before starting the pump that will take the cold oxygen inside the base. The less oxygen there is in your base, the less heat there is for your cold oxygen to mitigate when you pump it inside your base.

This system can be automated to be your only source of oxygen to constantly keep your base cooled. You will need an Atmo Sensor or maybe several scattered around, interconnected with automation wires, to continuously have your base depleted of warm oxygen before letting the cold oxygen inside. Just remember that a single Gas Pump can only pump 500g/s while your dupes use up 100g/s each.

Cool Slush Geysers
Cool Slush Geysers erupt polluted water at -10 °C and this can be used as an effective way to cool your base. Water and polluted water in game has a very high specific heat capacity and will absorb a large amount of heat from the surroundings without increasing too much in temperature. A geyser once found should be contained to keep the cold polluted water inside and cool this can be then piped though your entire base absorbing excess heat from the base. In addition you can use the water when it gets too hot and dump it into a reed fiber bed.

Start by insulating your geyser and putting in some extra storage for when the geyser goes dormant. Then attach the output pipe from that into the cooling loop you build into your base. this should be done with a liquid bridge similar to those that you would use to fill a cooling loop for an aquatuner. And you're pretty much done. Using very cold water like this may have some risks but as long as heat is being produced by your base or being absorbed from the rest of the map this method will last you for your playthrough. Some points to note is that you should make the pipes out of granite and use normal pipes and not radiant ones. Regular granite or igneous pipes will release the 'chill' slowly enough into your base as to not cause hypothermia. If an area is particularly hot, then use radiant pipes or pipes made with thermally conductive material to remove more heat from that area. Overall pipe work (it's a mess, it was actually meant to be temporary but i needed to keep it in to remove heat as well as expanded it overtime as my base cooling needs grew. It can be used to restore nature reserves) Cooling machinery spaces with the cold water.

I used reed fiber killing several birds with one stone as the excess fiber they produce is always good for later on in the game, this same fiber bed is the dump for my germy polluted water from the bathrooms. To remove the warm water use a liquid bridge that feeds into a liquid shutoff. A pipe thermal sensor is used to activate the switch this signal should be feed though a filter gate and set the filter gate to 10 seconds, this is done to prevent the switch from cycling too much. Using a liquid bridge like this will make the fluid "prefer" to flow off the loop because of how the game mechanics work until that backs up. (see bridge tricks for more information) In addition another liquid bridge should be used to feed onto the pipe that will go to the reed bed. this is done to give preference to the polluted water coming from the bathrooms and keep them from backing up.

The cooling pipes can also be installed into the floor and roof of rooms instead of in the middle of them. Bathrooms are especially problematic to cool this way since they typically already have pipes running in the floor and roof of the room as well as the interior. These spaces can be cooled by changing the tiles to metal and the temperature will eventually equalize out. Granite tiles also have a decent enough thermal conductivity for this application.

Partial Passive Cooling
Passive cooling means the system is independent and doesn't need additional power/cooling. This method is partial because it is not confirmed practically if it CAN be made fully independent.(in theory it should be able to) In Oxygen Not Included are a few substances which have different SHC and the change is reversible. The difference between 2 substance states to adds/deletes heat from the system. The amount of heat you want to remove depends on the difference in Specific Heat capacity(lower energy state(colder) should have a higher SHC than the higher energy state).

NOTE: Nuclear Fallout condensation point is lower(66.9 °C) than Nuclear waste vaporization point(526.9 °C), so even if the substance deletes a very large amount of heat it requires some additional cooling.